Children’s books with stories about climate-fueled are becoming important tools for helping children cope with their traumatic experiences, E&E reports. The stories, experts say, can help strengthen the mental and emotional resilience of both children and their parents after a disaster.
“There are times in disasters where we want to shield kids from the worst moments of the event, but sometimes they went through it,” said Melissa Brymer, head of UCLA’s National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. “And these stories help kids process it and give parents the language to talk about it even with very young children.”
One such story is Elizabeth Hartline’s There Was A Fire about the Maui wildfire that devastated Lāhainā last August, which includes mentions of deaths caused by the fires because, Hartline said, “these kids know about this … it was all over the news, and if we didn’t name it, it would become taboo and kids would think it was off-limits to talk about.” (E&E $)